Earth Observation services for Wild Fisheries, Oystergrounds Restoration and Bivalve Mariculture along European Coasts*

Sea related activities are set to increase and the growth in food production from sea enhancing global food security is already a reality. However, this growth must be aligned with increasing environmental constraints as well as complying and restoring regulations and frameworks. This requires the adoption of improved and efficient behaviors based on wider incorporation of available information and knowledge from the industry and citizens alike. Marine and coastal managers must make decisions to maintain the social, economic, and ecological health of marine and coastal areas in coastal and nearshore areas and to operate, plan and manage their activities at sea. The European funded FORCAST project represents a step forward in this direction by bringing the coastal water quality and met-ocean information closer to the target sectors: wild fisheries, oystergrounds restoration, and bivalve mariculture. FORCOAST will develop, test and demonstrate, in operational mode, novel Copernicus-based downstream information services that will incorporate and combine Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS), Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) and Climate Change Monitoring Service (CMS), local monitoring data and advanced modelling in the service. FORCOAST will provide consistent high resolution data products for coastal applications, based on a standardized data processing scheme. Furthermore, FORCOAST will make use DIAS which will help to develop the data access and cloud processing service. FORCOAST will provide those services in eight pilot service uptake sites covering five different regional waters (North Sea, Baltic Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea and the coastal Atlantic Ocean). The outcome of FORCAST is a novel commercial service that will provide Copernicus-based downstream information coastal services to a variety of stakeholders, which will result in an operation, planning and management improvement of different marine activities in the sectors of wild fisheries and aquaculture, having an economic and societal positive effect on the involved parties.

*This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870465